Conventional roller bearings, in particular, so-called solid roller bearings, are formed of through-hardened or case-hardened outer rings that are produced from tubular sections, rod sections, or forging blanks through metal-cutting processes, in order to produce the raceway, rim, and recesses. Such roller bearings with thick-wall outer rings are used, e.g., in motor vehicles. Due to the large number of parts, the design of the outer ring is optimized with respect to the load and the production costs.
For high-temperature applications, bearings are used whose rolling bodies are produced by the rolling of a strip on a spindle. The rolled roller bodies compensate for the thermal elongation at high temperatures. Such a bearing is known from DE 38 09 906 A1. In that document, a bearing is proposed that has several rows of rolling bodies of which one row consists of spring rollers. The spring rollers are produced from steel strips that are wound in a helical shape on pins.
The prior art also includes bearing rings that are wound from spring strip steel and can be used as a bearing inner ring or as a bearing outer ring. Such spring sleeves are held in a shaft or in a hole through internal pretensioning and the spring sleeve expands with the adjacent components when subjected to elevated temperatures. These spring sleeves are produced, e.g., by the company Eich Rollenlager GmbH, Hattingen (www.eich-waelzlager.de).
Conventional solid roller bearings have an outer ring that is produced from a material that is suitable for the roller bearing raceway. For the required metal-cutting rough processing, a relatively large percentage of the material is left over as cutting waste that first is complicated to produce and then must be disposed of or recycled in complicated procedures.
The mentioned wound bearing rings are suitable only for high-temperature applications and therefore only have sufficient accuracy for those ranges.